Orders of magnitude more in fact and so this transition from Maple to Mupad in the symbolic toolbox was giving me sleepless nights. I also support MATLAB at Manchester and we have a LOT more MATLAB users than MathCAD users.
Lecture notes needed to be rewritten, code needed to be modified and I spent ages scratching my head trying to work out where all the differences were. It wasn’t pretty! I support MathCAD at the University of Manchester in the UK and all of a sudden people’s symbolic calculations weren’t working as they expected.
When I first heard about this change I was very worried – I’ve seen this before you see.Īnother mathematical application, MathCAD, also used to use Maple as it’s symbolic engine and it dropped it in favour of MuPad when version 14 was released back in early 2007. So, this new incarnation of the Symbolic Toolbox for MATLAB may look the same as the old version but it has had a brain transplant and thus has a completely different personality with a different set of abilities and behaviours. The Mathworks then went and bought the company that produced MuPad and now the only way you can buy a copy of Mupad is to buy MATLAB together with the symbolic toolbox. For some reason, known only to Maplesoft and Mathworks, Maple was dropped from the symbolic toolbox in favour of the lesser-known MuPad. In older versions of the Symbolic Toolbox (2008a and earlier) it was a completely different application that did the symbolic grunt work on MATLAB’s behalf, namely Maple. Yes it does! You see, it wasn’t always MuPad that did MATLAB’s symbolic homework for it. It doesn’t matter that MuPad is really doing the work. This is all done seamlessly behind the scenes and so, as far as the user is concerned, the symbolic toolbox simply adds a range of new commands to MATLAB that can do symbolic calculations. Think of it as mathematical out-sourcing if you will – a bit like copying your friend’s calculus homework. Mupad solves the problem and sends the result back to MATLAB for display. What it does is send the problem to another program called MuPad. So how are these symbolic feats achieved you may ask? Well, it’s all a bit of a trick really because MATLAB isn’t doing any of the work itself. (Note to teachers: If you have a student who always gets the integral correct but shows no working and never includes the constant of integration – now you know why).
It misses off the constant of integration but this is the standard behaviour for almost all symbolic integrators and so isn’t anything to worry about.
It even has the power to evaluate integrals symbolically – something that I wish I had access to when I was in high school. It will also give the answer to our first quadratic exactly – which is nice. With the symbolic toolbox, however, calculations such as this are trivial thanks to the solve command If, on the other hand, you wanted to solve the general quadratic a*x^2+b*x+c=0 in terms of a,b and c then you are out of luck using MATLAB on its own. The syntax may look at bit minging at first sight but it does the job and does it efficiently. For example, if you want to solve the quadratic equation x^2 -2*x -5=0 numerically then basic MATLAB can help you. The base MATLAB package is strictly numerical and has no support for the symbolic manipulation of equations. If you are new to MATLAB then maybe a quick explanation is in order here. Just over a couple of weeks ago, The Mathworks released the latest version of their main product, MATLAB 2008b, which includes a completely new version of their Symbolic Toolbox.